Alongside other Luminaries like Tucker Carlson and Peter Hitchens
https://twitter.com/thelampmagazine/status/1557411084222488579
cowards deleted it
:will-fancy: “Oh, wait, wtf? He’s Catholic? Get the fuck out of here Virgil.”
:matt: “I should have know he was up to no good when he kept handing me all those danged tiny crackers.”
:felix-linus: “Oh yeah, I heard about Virgil being Catholic a while ago. But I was using his PlayStation account so I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.”
:amber-snacking: “You all should have asked him for indulgences when you had the chance.”
I’ve never noticed any specific friction between the chapos, except for Matt sighing every time Amber speaks.
What did Felix do?
Virigil running away to literally be a monk would be the funniest outcome.
This tweet was trolling I think. At least half of the people mentioned aren’t Catholic.
Why the fuck would anyone convert it Catholicism? I understand protestant and evangelical converts, and converting to Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, but Catholicism? What the actual fuck lol
Not necessarily about the Texas guy, but just the general trend apparently amongst some people. Legitimately can’t imagine why
No shade meant to people who are currently practicing Catholics, I just don’t understand how people not born into the religion convert to it nowdays.
Evangelical Christianity is for dumb hicks and these people fancy themselves dark brooding intellectuals. Buddhism is too hippy-coded. It has its appeal for Sam Harris types but its not trad and fashy enough for these people
catholics are “better” than fractalised protestant churches in a few ways.
funding: Big Catholic maintains more parishes at a ‘loss’ than smaller churches.
coherent theology: lotta prot churches are basically one preacher’s weird idea about ‘x’ and no-ones bothered to workshop them into logically consistent worldviews. yeah you can argue that’s not necessary for a faith organisation but someone probably finds it compelling when catholics have solid answers to most your questions
community: yeah the yanks and others are trying to tear it apart but i imagine its quite comforting & cool feeling to be able to go nearly anywhere on earth and attend a catholic service, whereas a southern baptist is SOL if they cross a fucking state line
but who are we kidding its 60% larp and 40% tryna fuck catholics
The Catholic Guilt to kinky sex weirdo pipeline isn’t entirely fictional.
I once read a very long Icelandic fiction novel about a boy who converted to the Catholic Church (from Lutheran) because it was the one institution still around from very long ago and therefore must be “true.” It was… interesting.
This one? I’ve started a couple of Laxness novels but haven’t been able to get into them.
Yes, that one! It’s the only Laxness novel I’ve read it I don’t know if it was good. I still think about it months on, and he’s clearly a talented author, but I could never really get into it. It had moments of greatness and (clearly) memorable characters but the rest was so… strange. Just don’t think I get what he’s trying to do yet. I still have no idea what he was trying to make me feel, or even what I myself felt other than a vague sense of confusion. I wanted the book to be so much more than it was, and it was clearly not interested in doing that. What was the best one you started?
There’s endless ritual shit you can do, with cool props and magic spells and stuff. Theres two thousand years of the nerdiest, most intensely naval gazing fan-fic to read through. There’s thousands and thousands of saints you can have a parasocial relationship with. There’s a bunch of weird social clubs and professional orgs and secret societies to join.
It’s big and it’s got a lot of inertia. The cathedrals are very pretty. Even shitty catholic churches probably have some cool stained glass windows or alter pieces. It’s much more formal than a lot of protestant churchs. You don’t have to make anything up because it’s all written down in excruciating detail. The rituals and the theology and the practices are the same in most catholic churches in the world. It’s stable, youdon’t get the constant schisms and fragmentation some protestant denominations go through.
I don’t think so. I only know what she mentioned on The Antifada, but I am pretty sure she was dating a different guy at the time. She did regularly talk about partying and doing whipits with him a lot over the years.
wtf is going on with all this catholic stuff lately?
The Evangelicals are dying out. National Mormonism is still waiting to be born. Now is the time of Catholics.
But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile. Anti abortion, but not in the freaky evangelical way. Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary. And weird communion rituals, but not really.
Like if you’re a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism? If you hate women’s rights in the USA, or want to do weird Jesus marches, why not go evangelical? I’m struggling here.
Isnt American Catholicism just another form of Protestantism? Like none of these people care about the pope or any saints. Catholicism just has more history, so it’s attractive to extreme nerds.
Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary.
I’ve prayed in front of a disembodied saints heart before
Maybe all the juicy catholic saints lore is just too intriguing to resist for all the kinds of people who like cataloging pop culture characters for fun
My guess is that it’s a weird elitist reactionary anti-capitalism. Protestantism is how the masses justify gorging themselves on the produce of American capitalism. It’s what the hill people and the suburban psychos believe in. Catholicism is refined, has a millennium of culture behind it. They worship in great basilicae, not dirty shacks. They actually follow some rules, not arbitrarily pick and choose what they believe in. Catholics aren’t so full of themselves that they think they can directly speak to god (unlike those silly prots), obviously you need a priest and some incense to talk to god.
But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile.
I was raised Catholic down in Texas, and there really wasn’t much of a difference between them and the local Lutherans or Methodists. Plenty of families with kids in the suburbs of Houston and Galveston. So the local Catholic schools and adjacent public schools had lots of young people doing young people things. The Church hosted plenty of big festivals and other community events which ranged from your annual Christmas Schmaltz to parking lot carnivals to movie night lock-ins and choir groups and generic youth mixers. All this stuff was in walking distance, in a suburb where there wasn’t much else to do. So the Church actually was one of the coolest and least sterile places to hang out.
And by the time you got to high school and sex/drugs/etc wasn’t just stuff the TMNT told you not to do in movies, plenty of your Catholic peers were happy to hook up or hook you up or whatever.
Like if you’re a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism?
Because nobody else in your town does paganism (openly, anyway) and your parents didn’t just kick in $10k to the local dioceses to do a big Winter Solstice Under the Stars event that all your friends are going to.
That’s not even to say my school didn’t have its share of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes. But if you had to pick out the cool kids, they tended to be the ones with the big families and the nicest houses and all the money. Those people also just so happened to be Catholic.
Go out to Utah and its the same thing with Mormons. Go down the Atlantic Coast and all the old-money extended families are Baptist or Methodist. Go out to the Midwest and I guarantee some of the coolest people in town will be Lutheran.
Paganism is all made up woo woo choose your own adventure bs. There’s no rules or structure, it’s just stuff hippies made up in the 70s and a bunch of misunderstood history and bits of movies and fantasy novels. Almost the complete opposite of Catholicism. If you want clear answers backed up by 2000 years of ritual and practice and theology you’d want to go with Catholicism
I’m non-religious and couldn’t fake it if I wanted to because lying even about little things makes me uncomfortable, but having grown up in an evangelical household with a lot of anti-catholic bigotry I could kind of see the appeal.
There are some progressive currents in the church right? Like liberation theology? And in my experience anti-catholicism (not opposition to Christianity in general, but like, protestant opposition to Catholics) feels tinged with anti Latin and anti non-anglo sentiment in general. My evangelical mother was convinced they were all crypto-pagans because of the whole saint thing.
I still wouldn’t join them, as mentioned above, I think it’s all make believe, but at least they don’t spawn prosperity gospel, snake handlers, Jerry Falwell etc etc. The downsides of the Catholic church are by and large problems with Christianity in general I feel.
Sorry if that was a bit rambley and stream of consciousness, this isn’t a topic I think about much and I think that a lot of my feelings about it are derived from seeing people who hate everything good (communism, feminism, pro-lgbt sentiment) also hating Catholicism when I was young.
I do think there’s an alt-right to catholic pipeline - chuds who want to launder their white nationalism through the not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church. “EMBRACE TRADITIØN” and all that. But the left, idk we’re just talking about like 3 podcasters here not necessarily a trend.
not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church
This is the church that sent missionaries along with colonial powers to convert the population of Africa, stole the land from the indigenous people, spread disease, and now tells African people that they will go to hell if they use the contraceptives that are proven to stop the spread of deadly diseases.
Relatively speaking the Catholic Church is much less immediately, “this is literally a sundown town” racist than white evangelicals. Catholicism has a real multinational, multiracial character. They’re still as racist as whatever they’re communities are, but they’re not literally built on racism the way a lot of evangelical churches are.
